Trump is making his 2016 embrace of extremism and hate look tame

Two days ago at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump sat down for an interview with Adin Ross, a 23 year-old "influencer." Ross, a livestreamer, rose to fame in 2022 after getting a boost from misogynist and accused rapist and human trafficker Andrew Tate. Ross is popular with, shall we say, a certain online set, which explains how he ended up at the former president's resort bearing gifts of a Rolex watch and a Tesla Cybertruck customized with an image of Trump in the moments after the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania last month.

The gifts–likely violations of campaign finance laws–got much of the attention, but we should in no way glide past what it meant that Trump hosted Ross, who, according to a 2023 Rolling Stone profile, has "given airtime to an anonymous neo-Nazi and platformed a high-profile white supremacist banned from mainstream social media."

Among many other revolting episodes detailed in the Rolling Stone piece, Ross has suggested that his online streaming service Kick "should bring aboard white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, who is banned from most mainstream social platforms for hate speech. He also wanted to invite Paul Miller, a.k.a. GypsyCrusader, a notorious neo-Nazi who advocates for race war and was convicted on multiple firearms offenses in 2021, to join the site. During that conversation, Ross also played a clip in which Miller uses the n-word while dressed as Hitler."

During the livestream with Ross on Monday, Trump commended the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, as a "really nice guy" with a "good heart." In 2022, Trump had hosted both Ye and Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago for dinner. A week later, Ye told conspiracist Alex Jones "I like Hitler" and "I love Jewish people, but I also love Nazis."

As someone who reported on Trump's mutual embrace with white supremacists and other extremists during his 2016 campaign, I am daily dismayed, disgruntled, and incredulous over how far too much of the reporting on him, eight years later, continues to be bizarrely milquetoast at best, and accommodating at worst. Trump, who incited an insurrection against the United States government, meets with overtly Hitler-admiring figures and open racists, it makes a few headlines, and then everyone moves on. Rinse, repeat, but never learn.

In 2016, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other extremists backed Trump, and he deliberately did not reject or repudiate these very public endorsements. Back then, most of his dalliances with these figures were online and on the airwaves, a wink and nod dance that enthralled them. A major party candidate brought them into the mainstream through tweets and non-condemnations on national television.

Back then, they were retweeted by Trump. Now, they are Mar-a-Lago guests.

Once, they were retweeted by Trump. Now, his son and running mate endorse their books.

The Harris campaign was right to demean Monday's rambling encounter with Ross as "a boring, low energy interview" and to also point out that Ross has "used racial slurs against Black Americans in livestreams and has a record of encouraging white nationalists."

But far too often the media does not know what to make of how Trump has made extremists the mainstream of the GOP, and how his selection of JD Vance as his running mate fits in with that. The Washington Post reported this morning that Vance has maintained a texting relationship with Charles Johnson, a Holocaust denier and longtime rightwing conspiracy theorist and instigator. The piece is worth reading for the Vance texts, but these two paragraphs of supposed context jumped out at me:

Vance is perhaps the most high-profile emblem of a new breed of conservative politician willing to entertain and endorse provocative or offensive figures. Trump has displayed similar impulses, including in 2022 when he dined at his Mar-a-Lago Club with Nick Fuentes, an outspoken Holocaust denier.

Unlike Trump, however, Vance has turned his ideological permissiveness into a political philosophy — an open embrace of the unvetted and the indecent aimed at undermining conventional norms of truth and decorum. Vance has defended his vision as a big tent representing how many Americans actually think. Democrats have described his approach as “weird,” a label that Harris allies have increasingly applied to the Trump ticket.

The amnesia exhibited in these two paragraphs is pretty astounding. It was Trump who brought these extremists into the mainstream of the GOP and the conservative movement, giving the alt-right the space to grow and develop into the New Right that, along with Peter Thiel's financial backing, transformed the otherwise unremarkable Vance into a right-wing celebrity. The misconception that Trump does not have a cohesive political philosophy is what allows him to wriggle away from being "pinned down" to a particular belief system. But he has always made what he thinks very clear.

Trump's dinner with Ye and Fuentes was not the result of an impulse, but rather a years-long effort to make white nationalism and racism conventional politics, and to reject pluralism and anti-racism as "woke" or un-American or "communist" or "globalist."

This is not "ideological permissiveness," or an "open embrace of the unvetted and the indecent." It's a deliberate cultivation of known misogynist and racist ideologies to advance an openly anti-democratic political agenda. Vance is not an emblem of this; he is the embodiment of it.

Democrats have not described "this approach" of "an open embrace of the unvetted and the indecent aimed at undermining conventional norms of truth and decorum," as "weird." They have described very specific anti-abortion, anti-trans, book-banning, and other policies sought and implemented by Republicans as "weird."

The rightwing reaction to Harris's selection of Tim Walz as her running mate, which has included calling him "Tampon Tim," over Minnesota's provision of menstrual products in public schools, has certainly been very, very weird.

An "open embrace of the unvetted and the indecent aimed at undermining conventional norms of truth and decorum" also does sound weird. But this mishmash of words obscures what is really at stake here. Trump and Vance are directly attacking democracy, equality, and pluralism. Is that so hard to say?